Quote from trader1966:
John Dough you ask people to stay away from the extreme, but you equate our elected leaders to Hitler. My advice is buy a morror and spend the weekend in front of it.
You are misrepresenting my comment so as to make it easy for you to suggest that I am hypocritical.
Nowhere above did I equate our leaders to Hitler. I said that if you want to live in a nation governed by a totalitarian, then "don't require any judicial or legislative scrutiny over the President, and eventually, the model which was known as the Third Reich is exactly what you will get here in this nation."
I assume from your complaining about me, that you find the current administration's actions completely acceptable, thus there is no need for either judicial or legislative scrutiny of the President's actions.
The difference between you and me is that you apparently are willing to trust your leader to do the right thing, while I want someone with a little more skepticism about the ability of a leader to resist the Siren's call of ultimate power, to be sitting on his shoulder.
Fundamentally, the question is reasonably asked: Why does Mr. Bush refuse any judicial oversight, even though the Congress created the FISA to deal with the circumstances we now face?
The Administration claims that the technological requirements make getting a warrant impossible/impracticable, etc. Actually, the Administration has never really nailed down exactly why this is so or even that it is so. Instead it just dances on the head of a pin, and taunts the courts and the people and the Congress to try and stop them from doing it their own way.
It may be that the Adminstration is completely right and that their way is the only way to get the job done. But, still We the People are Constitutionally entitled to have something more than a mere statement of: "trust me," before we sign off on the entire Bill of Rights, don't we?
I'm going to anticipate your response: if the Pres were doing it wrong, we would have been attacked again by now.
The problem with this rebuttal is that it is unverifiable for the exact same reason that we can't verify whether the Pres deserves our trust: because he permits no oversight.
The only person who is entitled to no oversight is God. Hitler set himself up as God. If Bush doesn't want to be equated with Hitler by his detractors (and, I am not either equating or detracting, here so don't start waving your magic mirror around), then Mr. Bush should say, "OK, let's have a judge sit in the NSA office and monitor what's going on."
It would be that friggin' simple. But, the Pres' ego just won't allow it. Which to me, demonstrates that the Pres is not to be trusted. If he were, then we would have the oversight and the entire argument would be rendered moot.